Point source excitation in direct and inverse scattering: The soft and the hard small sphere

A spherical wave emanating from a point source is scatteredby either a soft or a hard body. The incident spherical wavehas a wavelength which is much larger than the characteristicdimension of the scatterer and it is modified in such a wayas to recover the plane wave incidence when the source pointrecedes to infinity. Using low frequency expansions the scatteringproblem is transformed to a sequence of exterior potential problemsin the presence of a monopole singularity located at the sourceof the incident wave field. Complete expansions for the scatteringamplitude are provided. The method is applied to the cases ofa soft and a hard sphere and the first three approximationsfor the near, as well as the far, field are evaluated. It isobserved that every one, after the first, low frequency approximationof the far field, involves one spherical multipole more thanthe corresponding approximation for the case of an incidentplane wave. As the point singularity tends to infinity, therelative results recover all the known expressions for planeincidence. It is shown that for point excitation the Rayleighapproximation of the scattering amplitude for a hard sphereis of the second order, in contrast to the case of plane excitationwhich is of the third order. Simple algorithms that specifythe radius and the position of a soft and a hard sphere areproposed, which are based on the additional dependence of thescattering amplitude represented by the distance from the pointsource to the centre of the scatterer. The inversion algorithmis shown to be stable whenever the source point is not too faraway from the target sphere. A simple way to decide whetherthe sphere is a soft or a hard body is also provided.     

Finite Time Equipartition for Second-order Hyperbolic Systems

A sufficient condition for equipartition of energy for secondorder hyperbolic systems in three space variables is given.The condition states that the system should evolve in such away that the time derivative of a solution of the form (u₁,0)^T is connected with the space derivatives of a solution ofthe form (0, u₂)^T and the time derivative of (0, u₂)^T is connectedwith the space derivatives of (u₁, 0)^T.